Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

RocketAcademy writes "Arduino, the popular open-source microcontroller board, is powering a revolution in low-cost space-mission design. San Francisco-based Planet Labs, a spinoff of NASA's PhoneSat project, has raised $13 million to launch a flock of 28 Arduino-based nanosatellites for remote sensing. Planet Labs launched two test satellites this spring; Flock-1 is scheduled to launch on an Orbital Sciences Antares rocket in 2014. NanoSatisifi, also based in San Francisco-based company, is developing the Arduino-based ArduSat, which carries a variety of sensors. NanoSatisifi plans to rent time on ArduSats to citizen scientists and experimenters, who will be able upload their own programs to the satellites. The first ArduSat is scheduled for launch August 4 on a Japanese H-II Transfer Vehicle carrying supplies to the International Space Station. The cost of orbital launches remains a limiting factor, however. As a result, Infinity Aerospace has developed the Arduino-based ArduLab experiment platform, which is compatible with new low-cost suborbital spacecraft as well as higher-end systems such as the International Space Station. The non-profit Citizens in Space has purchased 10 flights on the XCOR Lynx spacecraft, which will be made available to the citizen-science community. Citizens in Space is looking for 100 citizen-science experiments and 10 citizen astronauts to fly as payload operators. To help spread the word, it is holding a Space Hacker Workshop in Dallas, Texas on July 20-21. Infinity Aerospace will be on hand to teach Arduino hardware and software."

That is why all the old guys at NASA always impressed the hell out of me, the amount of work they could get out of such weak hardware was frankly AMAZING, can you even imagine what a Phenom X6 or i7 could do running nothing but machine code? Hell everyone should try that little OS made in machine code "Kolibri OS" IIRC as you can take a 1GHz P3 and it'll just smoke many modern systems thanks to how close to bare metal that thing runs, its just nuts how bloated all the OSes and programs are now compared to w

Yes but that 3$ controller would have then needed a 3000$ certification that it won't electrocute the user or a 700$/hr specialist coder to tweak a setting. That 500$ pre-certified retail SBC looks like a bargain when anyone can modify the web page it is serving up. If something looks ridiculous to you, ask yourself "Am I the smartest person in the universe, or am I missing some information?"

are you saying that single board computers that consist of a single computer on a chip are getting certified for those reasons?

look, for these it's sat it's totally unnecessary for it to be an "arduino" and not atmel on it's own, except for the easier press value gathered from using the buzzword arduino.

That's exactly what I was thinking. Arduinos are development boards. They're supposed to allow you to easily prototype things on them. If you're going to build more than a couple, why would you ever spend $30 on an Arduino board, when you could have your own custom units made in bulk for $10?

Yeah I never understood that. Arduino is a good platform for testing or prototyping, since you have a lot of things you are going to use already provided on a board, and you can share your design with others that have the same hardware, but once your idea is solid and ready to be reproduced over and over, it just makes sense to build your own circuits around the controller.

Really, what exactly do they think these are actually useful for except for adding 'In Space' to a bunch ofcollege programming projects? As these dont even use radiation hardened electronics of any ECC, Isuspect investigating failure modes will be their main use.

Come on, the world is full of useful and interesting things to do, this just aint one of them people!

You will find that questioning the value of things that happen in space is tantamount to treason on/., it's a lese-majeste.

Only if you do it in a really stupid way, or lie and troll-bait people, or bring it up when completely off-topic. Otherwise, at worst it becomes like any other random argument on the internet. It is not any more treasonous than claiming saying something bad about EMACS or Chrome is treasonous because every one only talks about those and none of the alternatives.

If they want a professional space product using AVR, then there are many many boards that can do this, or they can design their own. Arduino is specifically designed for learning projects. Sure you can buy Arduino and then dump the dumbed down programming environment, but then why not pick a better or cheaper board? It seems "Arduino" is used by a lot of people as a synonym for "8-bit processor on a board that has ADC and GPIO".

I'd suggest watching the talk from LCA 2013. Video here [linux.org.au]. I went along and found it quite interesting. Puts Orbital science experimentation into the hands of people that would have never been able to afford it previously.

But I'm seaminly responding to another trollish post with a +4 Insightful. Imagine a class room full of students excited about science because their teacher organised for a bunch of their projects to go up into space, and that drives them to further that knowledge and go on to become successful scientists. No, there is no useful purpose for this project at all

They'll be operating in LEO [wikipedia.org], at 400KM where the ISS (International Space Station) is. Radiation hardening isn't as much of an issue in LEO. Companies and education institutions are using COTS (Commercial Of The Shelf) parts more and more for LEO satellites with great success.

Nowhere do I see mention of these arduinos being special, radiation-hardened versions. Nowhere, is there mention about extended temperature range, vibration, etc. These are all important if the mission is expected to succeed. Sure, it might be reasonable to expect a certain fatality rate among a flock of launched devices, and do cost accounting to figure out what tradeoffs can be made. I find it difficult, however, to believe that the current cost of launch, by weight, is lower than the cost of providing reliable hardware.

This is not meant to slight Arduino. I think it's great, but it's made to be a low-cost solution for instances where there is not much demand for reliability, and certainly not for such places where there is a demand for reliability under difficult circumstances. This project is a mistake, a waste of money, and courting disaster. I wish that all of those who had senior authority to approve this project to get fired, and to spend some time in hell (Hell is pretty bad. So, on the scale of things, about twenty minutes should do).

what the fuck does the satellite need the usb comms still attached to them? and without them the boards are just atmel avr boards with a bunch of kilobytes of the flash totally fucking wasted in this application.

"Nowhere do I see mention of these arduinos being special, radiation-hardened versions. Nowhere, is there mention about extended temperature range, vibration, etc. These are all important if the mission is expected to succeed."
Most small satellites do not use radiation-hardened components. Rad-hard chips provide 1/10 the power at 10 times the price, and thet aren't available when you need them. Generally, they're made to order with long lead times.
It's generally easier to add a watchdog circuit to reboo

You are strangely ignorant of the problems. Radiation hardening isn't the only problem, and radiation hardening does NOT mean long lead times or ultra expensive components. In the grand scheme of things and off the shelf 486 chip these days can almost be considered "radiation hardened" due to the low count and large size of transistors, and type of technology used back them. A stock standard ATMEL microcontroller on the other hand designed to be as small and cheap as possible with the lowest size die and th

You are strangely ignorant [...] and off the shelf 486 chip these days can almost be considered "radiation hardened" due to the low count and large size of transistors,

You are strangely ignorant if you don't know that Intel has long been producing genuinely radiation hardened x86 processors for the space program. It wasn't long ago they introduced the hardened Pentium, which AFAIK is about the most powerful hardened processor available so far. They were radiation hardening processors before the 486 was even a thing, before they even could make such fine features, because that most certainly is not sufficient radiation hardening.

I'm sure some Googling could find me some basics, but this would be a great chance to hear anecdotally from people who work on this stuff daily - how big of an issue is radiation and the hardening for circuits? What kinds of damage/effects are you having to counter, and how do you go about fixing it? There was a story floating around last month of the phone-based projects that are being launched. Are there certain zones or ranges in the magnetosphere where the radiation hits harder, or becomes a non-issue?

Radiation is a serious issue and can corrupt the stored program as well as runtime operation. Commercial devices will not last long in space. Even plastics degrade and shrink in space, due to evaporation of volatiles so the connectors will fall apart after a while. Another issue is the launch phase. The vibration of a rocket system is extreme and parts can break off the boards. Conformally coating the electronics and gluing down all heavy parts with RTV will make it last a little longer. Don't expect